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Tale of the FW 190 In August 1941, a new shape appeared over the French coast: a blunt-nosed, elegantly pugnacious profile possessed of startling performance bearing black crosses. It was the product of a two-year program that immediately changed the Channel air war. Britain’s standard Spitfire Mk V could not compete with the Luftwaffe’s new […]

Attached is a picture of my father (tall fellow standing) on an aircraft that appears to be shot down. My father immigrated from Denmark and joined the Canadian Army, 9 Canadian Field Squadron R.C.E.,formed in England April 1943. I know he was serving during the campaign in Italy. This picture came to my attention just last week […]

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Looking back at the Travel Air Manufacturing Company of the late 1920s from this end of history’s telescope, it looks like an aviation dream team. Of course, at the time, there was no way to know that each of the company’s founders, Walter Beech, Clyde Cessna and Lloyd Stearman would go on to become aviation […]

Flight Petty Officer Saburo Sakai was having a good day. His squadron of A6M2 Zeros of the Tainan Wing had departed Rabaul, New Britain, more than 500 miles northwest of the previously obscure island of Guadalcanal, responding to an American amphibious landing. In a series of combats north of the island, Sakai had shot down […]

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Hitler and his Luftwaffe don’t have the kind of image that would brighten a feminist’s day. Even so, if today’s public is asked to name German test pilots, the only two names likely to be uttered would be Hanna Reitsch and Melitta Schiller/von Stauffenberg. From debugging piloted buzz bombs and making heroic rescue flights to […]

B-17 crewmen remember the German missions Aboard each of the thousands of B-17 Flying Fortresses that left the soil of England bound for targets in Europe were 10 young men. Outwardly, they were no different from any late-teen or early-twenties boy you’d meet anywhere in America. Same faces, same names, same youthful vigor and sense […]

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Known as Little Boy and Fat Man, the atomic bombs that the Superfortresses dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were game changers Development of nuclear weapons began in early 1943, following years of scientific and engineering research. The Manhattan Project managers identified two methods of firing a nuclear weapon, and given the prospects for ending the […]

The Messerschmitt Bf 109 series went through innumerable major and minor design changes throughout its career. However, three were most significant—the E or “Emil,” the F or “Friedrich,” and the G or “Gustav.” The Emil was best known as the Battle of Britain 109, readily distinguished from earlier models by its more streamlined nose, yet […]

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Phil High’s Aviation Photography taken at night results in aircraft photos of unexpected beauty and drama. As a longtime volunteer photographer for the Experimental Aircraft Association at their annual orgy-of-all-things-aerial in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Phil High will regularly be seen lying on the ground, getting dramatic angles of an airplane. Or homing-in on the details that […]

War was coming to the ocean called “Pacific.” Imperial Japan, in need of oil to feed its growing ambition, squirmed under the stricture of an American embargo (implemented because of Japan’s aggression toward China). Japan would not be denied its self-proclaimed destiny, so Tokyo’s warlords cast covetous eyes southward to the petroleum-rich Dutch East Indies, […]